Toll-free telephone calls have become more and more prevalent in today's personal and business communications. With the increase in toll-free communication traffic, it has become more important as well as more difficult and complex to direct or route a toll-free telephone call from its point of origination to its final destination using an efficient communication path. As used in this application, efficiency refers to balancing the conflicting desires to evenly distribute communication path traffic and to simultaneously minimize communication path transmission costs. In particular, the complexity of toll-free telephone call routing has increased because a network manager must consider vast amounts of information and make choices from numerous possibilities when modifying a probabilistic routing parameter, which is described in more detail below.
A routing parameter is a variable used to select a particular communication path over which a telephone call travels. A network manager sets the probabilistic routing parameter, which is one of many routing parameters, based upon many pieces of information relating to communication path traffic and transmission costs. As the information regarding traffic and costs becomes available to the network manager, the network manager sets the probabilistic routing parameters to increases overall system efficiency. However, the information available to the network manager exceeds the network manager's ability to process the information. It is, therefore, desirable to automatically determine routing probabilities that can then be modified either automatically by a processor or manually by the network manager to improve the routing of telephone calls.